Thursday, March 3, 2011

Dibels Ideas

For the Kindergarten Dibels test we have to test on beginning sounds, alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, and nonsense words. In order to help my students with this I have them practice each type of test (obviously not the same one they will be given) every week. Parent volunteers run these groups for me. Also, I have ABC flashcards that I use everyday and I time the students for one minute as they run through them as a whole group. I also have nonsense word flashcards I use every day as well. This has really helped my students, especially with the nonsense words. Unfortunately part of the process of getting your students to achieve high scores on the Dibels test is training them towards the test format...sad but true.